Avoidance: The Hidden Enemy of Your Ideal Future

If you want to create your ideal future, you need to avoid avoidance.

You need to learn how to face your negative feelings, thoughts, and emotions. How to do things you're afraid of, scared of, or intimidated by. How to have hard conversations, dreaded confrontations, or difficult negotiations.

Here's why:

Avoidance Feeds Your Problems

Problems grow on their own. You don't have to do anything particularly wrong to turn small problems into a big crisis. Doing nothing is enough.

Just ignore the bill, the necessary conversation, or the nagging fear you feel every day and see how quickly these minor problems turn into serious issues.

Avoidance fuels your problems. It's exactly what your problems need to thrive. The more you avoid your problems, the more time they have to grow and the easier they become full-fledged catastrophes.

Avoidance is the air that keeps your problems alive.

Avoidance Creates More Avoidance

The more you avoid something, the more likely you become to avoid it again.

What you avoid grows a little, while you shrink a bit. Avoid the same thing for long enough and it will become very threatening, all-consuming, and seemingly insurmountable. At the same time, you'll become timid, paralyzed by ear, and afraid to even look at it. Then you avoid it again and again and again until you can't face it at all.

This is the devious cycle of avoidance that can keep you stuck with the same problems forever. Being stuck with the same problems for a long time is a quick and easy way to become resentful, bitter and unwilling to create a better life for yourself.

Avoidance compounds on itself and can easily keep you stuck.

Avoidance Sits Between You and the Life You Want

They say "Everything you want is on the other side of fear."

I'd say that the life you want is on the other side of avoidance.

Creating the life you want is hard. There are countless reasons why you might not want to do it. That means that there are countless reasons why you might want to avoid creating it, too.

But, to create it you have to do hard things, give up pleasurable things, and sacrifice who you are to become who you could be.

Avoidance prevents all of that.

If you follow avoidance, you'll avoid doing hard things, cling to pleasure, and evade the sacrifices necessary that would help you create the life you want.

You'll have to overcome avoidance to avoid this fate.

With some of the reasons for avoiding avoidance out of the way, let's look at three ways you can start to fight back.

Allow and Welcome Negative Feelings, Emotions, and Thoughts

A big reason why you avoid things is because of the negative feelings, emotions, and thoughts you associate with them.

You are afraid of the fear, shame, and regrets you might feel. You are afraid of the blame, the harsh judgments, and the sadness.

Thus, you avoid the thing whenever possible. In our modern age of distractions that's easier than ever.

One way to stop doing this is to allow yourself to feel what you feel, think what you think, and experience what you experience. Positive or negative, it doesn't matter. Welcome whatever thoughts or feelings your mind creates for you and sit with it while trying not to judge it.

The more you allow yourself to feel uncomfortable and distressing thoughts, feelings, and emotions without judging them the less power they have over you. Especially if they're negative. Realize that your feelings, emotions, and thoughts are a normal part of being human.

If you practice this for a while, you'll avoid these feelings less, because you've learned to sit with and accept them.

Write Down Your Personal Hell

Most people have their fear in front of them, stopping them.

By creating your personal hell, you can get your fear behind you, pushing you forward.

Your personal hell is the life you will create if you let all your bad habits, negative feelings, and fears get the best of you. It's what will happen if you let them drive your decisions, determine your actions, and create your feelings.

If you want to be scared out of your mind simply make a list of all the bad things you do (by your own judgment) and vividly imagine what your life will be like in 2 months, 2 years, or 2 decades, if you'd give in to them every day. This is your personal hell.

Creating this hell will get your fear behind you.

Having a good life to create in front of you can be motivated.

But running away from your personal hell, that's really gonna push you forward.

So, take a pen and a piece of paper. Then write down all your flaws, bad habits, and fears. Then write down what will happen if you give in to them daily. Then remind yourself of the hell you'd live in then.

This will help you say "no" to avoidance because you know that saying "yes" to it will create your personal hell.

Humble Yourself So You Can Be A Fool

Avoidance often goes hand in hand with a big ego.

You avoid the thing because your ego makes you think that you can't start small. You have to start big to make the thing worthwhile. But starting big might be too much for who you are right now. So, you're scared, overwhelmed, or afraid. So you avoid starting and don't start at all. That's bad because it keeps your problems alive.

To counteract your ego, develop the willingness to be a fool.

Learn to start small. Learn to look low for what you not only could do but for what you could do AND would do. That's enough. That's something you can get started with.

So, cultivate the courage to become a fool and you'll have a mighty weapon against avoidance.

Conclusion

Avoidance is poison.

It poisons your present, your future, and your life.

Avoidance grows your problems, compounds on itself, and prevents you from creating the life you want.

To stop avoiding things allow yourself to feel your feelings and welcome them. Write down your personal hell, so you can get your fear behind you and humble yourself enough to become a fool.

Combining this deeper understanding of avoidance with the three potential solutions you've learned about equips you with some tools to fight avoidance.

If you find others that work better for you, use those!

How you fight avoidance doesn't matter nearly as much as overcoming it as often as possible.

The more you do, the better your odds of creating the life you want.